Has competition come into play since your disclosure of last year that you’re aware of?
SMITH: I don’t really discuss competition. You know, we’ve been trying to just focus on our development work.

The molecule changes shape and that’s what causes the color change. With the recent focus on green products, the environment, has this accelerated your development efforts.
SMITH: Oh yes. We have a research portfolio focused on green projects. This is called sustainable research, sustainable development. So we have a range of projects within that portfolio. We have things like high yield paper. We also have solid ink printers, which don’t use as many consumables as xerographic printers. This project is one of these sustainable research projects. So we have a range of projects within sustainable innovation, and this is one of them. The environment is really extremely important here. It always has been. The Xerox carbon footprint is extremely important to us. So that’s one of the reasons we’re really pushing on these types of projects. There will be continual innovations within green technology in the future. So yes, this is really important. It’s one of the main reasons why we do these types of projects, yes.

And the process that goes when the imprint is originally made by the UV source onto the paper, and/or when the paper is self-erasing, is there anything emitted into the environment during either of those processes?
SMITH: Oh. No. No. What happens is there’s a compound in the paper, and that compound is colorless. On addressing with UV, it changes the color, it literally just reconfigures itself, so it doesn’t emit anything. It just changes shape. The molecule changes shape and that’s what causes the color change. And then it reforms back to that colorless shape, either on heat or when we expose it to a different color light. So it doesn’t break up or anything like that for the color. It just really rotates itself, and that causes the color change. So no, nothing’s emitted. Literally we just use a beam of UV light, hits the paper, molecule changes shape, and then we change it back again. But no, this is very environmentally friendly technology.

I would imagine the ink toner producers aren’t the biggest fans of this.
SMITH: Well, I think that we’re the biggest toner producer. Bill, you can probably come in on this. Are we the biggest?

McKEE: We are the largest manufacturer of toner in the world, so it’s certainly an area of interest, but this is — we’re always looking for ways to expand our business opportunities, so we don’t see this as a threat, but more as a complementary process.

So you don’t anticipate it cannibalizing any percent of your sales or market?
McKEE: Paul, you’ve got some numbers on the increase in printed documents, so that the overall printed documents are increasing. Those documents that are only of a transient nature that would be printed on this type, we’ll be able to see that, again, not as a threat, but as more of a complement.

SMITH: Yes. That’s right. Paper printing is increasing approximately at three percent compounded annual growth rate. There’s, over two trillion pages printed in the office even this year, and it’s growing all the time. So really you’re not going to really see that decrease in printed pages. It’s really, as Bill said, it’s complementary. It’s to be only used for documents that you print in the office on a daily basis.

This is contrary to the paperless office concept that was discussed four or five years ago.
SMITH: No. You could really look at it as a step forward on that, because, on the one side of the spectrum there is the piece of paper that you can just throw away, and on the other side, there is the electronic paper document, like ePaper or eBook, or eDocuments, which make up a fully functional paperless office concept, which Xerox is also researching into. We have a project looking at making flexible backplanes for eReader and, eDocument types of applications. Then there is the reusable paper concept. You can reuse the paper, so it has some intelligence added to it. We consider this to be within that spectrum of projects, moving towards the paperless office.

On existing laser printers, there is technology that prints nearly invisible tracking codes on each printed paper, which enables the identification of the printer for security reasons. Does this technology, being that there’s no ink involved, will that tracking code technology be lost with your erasable paper concept?
SMITH: I think a tracking codes are probably for more permanent type of document, that you’re actually going archive and store, so this technology isn’t really focused on that area.

Well, Dr. Smith, thank you very much for the generosity of your time.
SMITH: Oh. Thank you very much. We enjoyed talking to you.